In this video I am going to teach you how to loop, and that looks like this.
Now looping, one of the most important things about learning this trick is
making sure you have the right yoyo. It is so important we actually made a video called
Making the Perfect Yoyo to help you sort that out, but the main things are is you want to
have a yoyo with a narrow shape that responds immediately when you pull it. That is because
obviously with looping the yoyo is going to be constantly going out and coming back to
your hand. Without a yoyo that is like that it is almost impossible to learn this trick.
The first thing that you want to know with looping is that it starts with a Forward
Toss. That just looks like this. We have another video that teaches you how to do that, but if you
don’t already know how to do that it is really simple. All you are going to do is swing your yoyo
hand with the top of your hand facing forward. You are going to let the yoyo go half-way through.
Then when the yoyo gets to the end of the string, turn your hand over to catch it. It is pretty
straightforward. If you are having trouble definitely check that other video out as well.
With looping, what is going to happen is as the yoyo is coming back to you,
you are going to throw the yoyo back out again, without catching it. The motion starts
as the yoyo is coming back to you. It probably starts when the yoyo I about this far away.
All you are doing with your yoyo hand is you are just going to bend your fingers
in and then flick your hand back out, just like this. The real secret to looping is
that you want to keep a lot of tension on the string. This motion actually does that.
What you might not anticipate at first is you might actually just think that the looping is just
throwing the yoyo back out again. Because that is what is happening. The key to really making
it work is to start pulling the yoyo in as it is on its way back. That is why the motion starts
by bringing your hand in and then throwing back out. When you bring your hand in you are actually
pulling on the yoyo, accelerating it, and you want to accelerate it consistently all the way
from above your hand until it exits beneath your hand. I cannot express how crucial that
is when getting your perfect loop, is to have that constant tension on the string.
The other thing that you might not expect if you have tried looping before
is that the basic loop doesn’t actually happen on the outside of your wrist,
it happens on the inside of your wrist, just like this. Honestly that can be a little bit scary at
first because your’e asking the yoyo to come right here and then go right back out. If you are not
careful or if you are not thinking about it too much the yoyo can hit your chest, your shoulder,
if you are really not paying attention it can hit your face. Usually that doesn’t happen.
If you think about it, if you don’t do anything, if you just throw the yoyo out
and then let it drop down then the yoyo is going to go straight down. It is part of that pulling
back motion and then throwing it forward again, that is the key to getting this trick to work.
You can see how close it gets to me. It is actually not super close. If I do loops that are
big enough they start to get closer and they will start to hit my chest a little bit. That is one of
those indicators that you can use to determine, are you starting your motion a little too early
or too late. If you are starting too late then the yoyo is just going to drop down like this.
If you are starting your motion too early then the loops will be so big they will start to hit you.
That is something you need to figure out. How are you going to time the loop so that you can get the
motion consistently. You can see, this is about how close you want the yoyo to your body. You can
see that it is barely going back to my elbow. That is how tight I am keeping these loops.
Another thing that you want to keep in mind: you can see I am adjusting my string tension here.
Every time you do an inside loop with your right hand the string is going to get a little bit
looser. With your left hand your string is going to get a little bit tighter. You can correct that
either with an inside Sidewinder, you can do it the same way on each hand, to the inside of your
body, or you can do an outside UFO, that will also adjust the string. We have another video
about managing your string tension that you can look at if that is giving you trouble as well,
which it definitely will when you are learning how to loop because every single time you loop
the yoyo actually flips over as it passes by your arm right here. That causes the yoyo to get
looser and looser, again if you are right handed, tighter and tighter if you are left-handed. You
do want to work in, maybe count a certain number of loops, of you can just look at the string - if
it is starting to get a little too loose then you do that inside Sidewinder and you are good to go.
Another thing you want to pay attention to as you are doing your loops is the angle that the yoyo
is at. If I were to just loop at the camera right here, you can see once I have control of my loops
it is always angled just about 30 degrees or so. Maybe 45, but it is not sitting straight
up and down, it is always angled off to the outside just a little bit.
Because this is what you want when you are looping a lot of people want to know,
how do I get it to angle. I don’t know anybody who has come up with a really good explanation of
exactly what you need to do to get that to happen. Instead of thinking about changing your technique
in order to make that specific thing happen, take it more as an indicator that your technique
is getting better. The better your technique gets, the more the yoyo is going to lock into that 30
degree angle as you are doing your loops. If you don’t have the yoyo at that angle, then you still
need to start making adjustments. You can try turning your hand a little more to the outside as
you do your loops, or a little more to the inside. Obviously, this is too much and this is too much.
There might be a small adjustment that you need to make. You can also start your loops
a little bit earlier or later to see if that helps a little bit. There are all sorts of
small adjustments you can make that will affect the way your yoyo loops, one of the indicators
that you are getting it right is that the yoyo is going to line up at that 30 degrees angle,
that helps you keep it under control, but also tells you that you are doing it the right way.
The last thing that you want to think about when you are looping is pretty much all the motion
is coming out of your wrist. That makes sense because your wrist can move and snap so fast,
that is how you can quickly accelerate the yoyo both towards you and away from you
without a really large motion. That way you can do your loops very quickly. When you are first
getting started you might be tempted to do a whole arm motion in order to get the yoyo to do the
right thing. It is not that that cannot work, but the smaller, the more compact your motion is, the
better you will be able to get at looping. This is good technique for every single type of loop,
to make your motion as small as possible. That is true of Hop the Fence. You can see I am using that
same wrist action where I am coming in and then accelerating it over my hand. It is also true for
Punching Bags, we are going to get into all these different types of loops, outside loops,
everything. All the loops work exactly the same way, but you want to make that motion as compact
as possible. For the inside loop what that means is you kind of keep the rest of your arm
pretty much still. It is not entirely still, but it is pretty much still.
Just depend on that acceleration of the pulling of the yoyo in towards you and then throwing
it out. That adds so much speed every time it will carry it all the way through as you do it.
The thing with loops is everything is about repetition and then
more repetition on top of that. Like I said at the beginning of this video:
get a good yoyo, make sure it is setup right, make sure your string length is setup right,
which we also talk about in the Making of the Perfect Yoyo video. Once you have all
of those things in place all you need to do is keep doing it and doing it and doing it.
Don’t feel like you have to get 100 at a time. I think the best way to approach it is, why not try
to just get 1. Once you feel comfortable getting 1 and you are getting it most of the time then try
2, then 3, then 10 and so on. Eventually you will be able to hit as many as you can possibly hit
before your string gets so twisted the yoyo just won’t loop any more at all. Once you have that
good you want to teach it to your other hand so that you can start doing 2-handed tricks
as well, because that is where 2-handed yo-yoing, or looping yo-yoing, gets really exciting.
Get your yoyo, put in the time,
and before you know it throwing down 100, 200, 300 even more loops than that.